Devon Songwriter Austel Returns to Folk Roots on New Album ‘Mirror To Mine’

Annie Rew Shaw, the Devon-born artist who records as Austel, has never been short on atmosphere. Her 2024 debut Dead Sea built its world with care. But on the newly released follow-up, Mirror To Mine, she strips things back. The album moves away from layered production toward a more direct engagement with the folk music that grounded her early practice.

The ten-track record leans into restraint. Where her previous work stretched outward, these songs draw their strength from interior logic — each part made to stand on its own while feeding a larger, quieter architecture. Describing the process, Austel frames the album as a deliberate return. “This album grew out of a longing to return to music made before too much external influence,” she explains, “to memories that had long lay dormant, waiting to be untangled and released, to places and sounds interwoven with those moments.”

That sense of retrieval gives the record its spine. The closing track, shaped around themes of homecoming and the blur between arrival and departure, feels less like an ending than a chapter sealing itself shut. Austel is currently on tour, with a London date at Green Note on June 18th and a final show at Exeter’s 12 Bar Music & Social on June 20th.